Rumsfeld talks…

This week, GQ has an interview up with The Donald..aka former DoD head Donald Rumsfeld. It’s relaxed, almost funny at first blush. Rummy talks about the mule he bought his wife for her birthday. The article is written by Lisa DePaulo.

I find poetic justice in the mammal being a mule, but perhaps that’s just me. No one this side of George Bush is more stubborn than Rumsfeld in my point of view. The article then goes on to show the banter between Rumsfeld and his wife Joyce…pages upon pages of small talk. Finally on page 5 of the GQ article..they get to some meat. Rumsfeld has written a chronology of events that happened in the world and his place in it. From the article:

The chronology is a reminder of the profound influence DHR has wielded for more than half a century: naval officer. Four-term congressman. The youngest (and then oldest) secretary of defense. Top aide under Ford and Nixon (who once called him “a ruthless little bastard”). Ambassador to NATO. Middle East envoy. Two lucrative stints as a CEO in private industry-

Was Rumsfeld a ‘ruthless little bastard”? Only history can tell us for sure, but in my little mind he most certainly was when he signed on for his second stint as Secretary of Defense under George Bush. Rumsfeld was a man that wanted to correct his legacy as the youngest Secretary of Defense under Nixon. Rumsfeld was one of the architects of the occupation of Iraq, also known as the Iraq War. I will not be the one to judge Bush’s Secretary of Defense. History and God will do that. Rumsfeld virtually had no plan after the invasion of Iraq, and our troops are paying a heavy price for his lack of foresight today. Rumsfeld was once asked what the worst day of his time in office under Bush43.

His response: the day he saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

Back to the GQ article my dear reader. Rummy and his wife own a 50 acre ‘farm’ in Taos NM, which is nothing if not a bastion for old hippies and the like. Evidently much of the interview took place there. The next 3 pages are fluff, talking about Rummy as a casual man now and how he loves his ‘farm’. Then, the author asks Rummy about his legacy;

Is it your legacy you’re worried about?

“Nooo! I don’t think in that term.”

You don’t? Maybe a little bit?

“No. You get up and do what you do. And when it’s over, it’s over.”

He pushes out his chair, checks his watch.

But when you look back…

“You know? I am not a person who looks back. You say, ‘When you look back.’ If you asked me when was the last time I looked back, I don’t do much of it. I just don’t. Tomorrow’s what’s important, much more important than yesterday.”

But how do you want to be remembered?

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Accurately.”

Okay, then. How do you think you’ll be remembered?

“I don’t have any idea.” He’s slightly annoyed now. But: “I know it’ll be different than it is today; it always is. I think you read in that little paper I showed you on the plane that Harry Truman went out of office with, I think, a 19 or 20 percent approval rating. And yet what was accomplished in his presidency, with all those institutions that served the world and our country so well for fifty years, it’s just amazing.”

Rumsfeld then goes on to say he was never close to Colin Powell, he doesn’t miss King George and yes, he still sees the big Dick Cheney. He also blames the press for the fact that people consider Bush to be an idiot without any natural curiosity.

I almost bit a hole in my lip when I read that last one..Bush shows no curiosity towards anything publicly, so what else should people assume?

Back to Rummy…the author asks him if he would ever consider apologizing, ala Robert McNamara for his part in the Iraq War. The Donald answered her, but off the record. Up to the bitter end of his reign, Rumsfeld was still chirping about the importance of ‘winning” in Iraq. Speaking to a gathering of employees 10 days before he left office, Rumsfeld defended his record on Iraq and Afghanistan and warned of “dire consequences were we to fail” in the Iraq war.

Well…We have failed in Iraq Donald. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it’s a colossal failure and there is no chance of “winning” a military victory there. How could this man that many perceived as the brains behind the Afghanistan and Iraq wars even think for one minute that Iraq is still winnable? He was asked what he thought of the ISG report in another article I read recently when researching this piece. His response was that there was nothing new in there. Donald Rumsfeld was bullshitting everyone up to the very end, still spouting off publicly that we can win in Iraq, but writing a memo that held a more realistic view.

The author asks Rummy if he thinks he was made the fall guy for the failure of the Iraq War. His answers are nothing if not interesting:

“No. I think anyone who’s involved in a war-eh, wars are difficult things, they’re messy things, they’re dangerous things, people die, people get wounded. And anyone who’s involved, someone’s not gonna like it, someone’s gonna be critical of it. So I-if you’re in the business I was in, uh, that goes with the territory.”

He goes on. “If you do anything, somebody’s not gonna like it, that’s inevitable. Therefore, if you want to be liked-as Tony Blair said, popular, which is a terrible word-if you don’t do anything, then everyone’s gonna like you. And if you do do something, somebody’s not gonna like it. And when you cancel weapons systems, you’re gonna get a bunch of generals unhappy about it. Because that’s what they spent their whole life on, working on those things, getting ready for it. That doesn’t bother me. I’ve been changing things for decades. I went into companies and changed them. And I-I’m comfortable with that, I accept that, that there’s gonna be opposition to things. I was asked to come into the department, by the president, to transform it. I could have gone in and not done that. And everyone would have been smiling. And the defense contractors that were doing what they were doing would be happy, the congressmen who had things going on in their districts would be happy…

“The fact is, we’re in a conflict and a struggle-the first conflict of the twenty-first century for the United States of America. It is new, it is unfamiliar to the American people, and there’s… In a very real sense, the American military cannot lose a battle, they can’t lose a war. On the other hand, they can’t win the struggle themselves. It requires diplomacy, it requires economic assistance, it requires a range of things that are well beyond the purview of the Department of Defense.” His purview. “In terms of what’s going on in Iraq or Afghanistan today, what the Department of Defense is doing is working. What isn’t working is the diplomatic side. The government of Iraq has not been able to find ways to bring the elements of that country together sufficiently that they can create an environment hospitable to, uh, whatever one wants to call their evolving way of life, a democracy or a representative system or a freer system. Look at Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets.”

I picked my jaw up off my laptop and sat there for a minute..re-reading what Donald Rumsfeld had to say..how he attempted to validate what our government has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, what our government has done TO Iraq and Afghanistan. I felt my blood pressure rising, my head started to hurt.

I no longer cared to finish the article..I no longer gave a rat’s ass about what Donald Rumsfeld thinks. I made it to page 15 out of 16 my dear reader. He will rationalize everything regarding Iraq and Afghanistan until the cow’s come home, until hell itself freezes over. He will never apologize like Mac the Knife did for Vietnam. That’s what men like Rumsfeld do I guess…but its still disgusting to me that this man can say..with a straight face that 28 million people are ‘free’ in Afghanistan and it’s the Iraqi governments fault things haven’t worked out in Iraq.

Freaking amazing..no?

Crossposted at The Blue Republic

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